


Systems

by dasfreefree, imagine_that_haikyuu



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Female!Reader - Freeform, Light Angst, Poetry, Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:27:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24669868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dasfreefree/pseuds/dasfreefree, https://archiveofourown.org/users/imagine_that_haikyuu/pseuds/imagine_that_haikyuu
Summary: It's unusual to find your soulmate at such a young age, but somehow you and Tsukishima managed this feat at the young age of five. However, as you grow up, it becomes obvious to him that something went awry for the universe to deem you compatible: you're just too different.Perhaps, the definition of soulmate needs to be examined further.
Relationships: Tsukishima Kei/Reader
Comments: 3
Kudos: 58





	Systems

**Author's Note:**

> This scenario was originally posted on April 2, 2017 to our [tumblr](https://imagine-that-haikyuu.tumblr.com/post/159120333173/akkaksisjjdu-sobs-now-that-i-know-youre-cool-w). Some edits have been made since then.
> 
> Writer: Rachel Lauren
> 
> Anonymous asked: akkaksisjjdu /sobs now that I know you're cool w soulmate aus I gotta do this. you know that soulmate au where whatever you write/draw on your skin appears on your soulmate's skin? can you write one for tsukishima? 🌚🍟
> 
> Anonymous said: you're actually quite a fast writer! a lot Of Other haikyuu imagine blogs take longer than you, so dont sweat it :) in the meantime, can I request a scenario where tsukki's been dating his gf for a while but they haven't been acting like a couple and it creates a misunderstanding-tsukki thinks she must not be that into him, and gf thinks he's not attracted to her/generally dislikes displays of affection, and they're both upset about it? if it's too specific you Can change it up
> 
> So you may need to [read the notes](http://imagine-that-haikyuu.tumblr.com/post/159122100258/here-are-the-notes-for-the-tsukki) I wrote up for this one.

There’s a logic to everything in life; the world functions as one large system made up of smaller systems. Tsukishima Kei knows this much to be true, and from a young age, his way of thinking molds around this line of thought.

Also at a young age, Tsukishima met his soulmate. Everyone went on about how he was one of the lucky ones, about how rare it was for someone to find their match before they turned ten. He wasn’t so sure about that.

His mother had taken him shopping at a department store on the day he met you. He was five-years-old. When he got restless, she dropped him off at a play center to keep kids occupied under supervision while their parents shopped. You were there too, seated at a brightly-colored plastic table with two other kids. They happily colored away, the markers squeaking when pressed too hard to the page. Your page was already full, however covered in words both real and nonsensical for the sake of rhymes, and with no fresh paper in sight you decided to make your arm your new page.

There wasn’t any point in coloring if there was nothing else to draw on, so Tsukishima made his way over to the bins of toys across the room. It was only when he reached for one of the dinosaur figures from one of them that he noticed black lines appearing on his forearm. In the next few moments, the lines came together and he recognized the kanji enough to know it said, “sky.”

Even though his glasses never remedied his peripheral vision, only a quick glance out of the corner his eye was enough to catch that you were drawing on your skin with a black marker. That, and the word rhymed with the words you had written on the page that he saw before.

At first, he liked the little drawings and writings that would appear on his arm during school. Sometimes, he drew or wrote something back. You two had lots of play-dates since your first meeting, but something about this form of communication was a little thrilling. It reminded him of when Akiteru would puncture the bottoms of paper cups and thread a string between them so they could whisper to each other and still hear each word with perfect clarity. Sure, anyone could see what was on his skin if it was visible, but whatever was there was only meant for him.

The novelty gradually wore off.

It first started when he was eight, and had to dress up for a formal family event. That afternoon, you decided to cover your arm from wrist to elbow in an aimless stained-glass pattern. With paint, of course. The colors bled onto the sleeve of his white button-down. Tsukishima had to wait while his mother called yours to have her wash the paint off your arm. It didn’t matter, though. The shirt couldn’t be salvaged after that, and Akiteru had to lend Kei his sport jacket to hide his stained sleeve.

From there, you didn’t draw or paint on yourself anymore. In fact, the only time either of you’d see mysterious markings on your skin would be accidental. You’d find the tips of your fingers a muddy turquoise when Tsukishima got paint on his during art class. He’d wake up on a Sunday morning only to find doodles on his face because you were the first to fall asleep at a friend’s house the night before.

In middle school, you began writing. It started with words at first, and then sentence fragments. Tsukishima often found them scrawled along his arms. They were almost always some strange, abstract descriptions and often disjointed in nature. After sometime doing this, you called him.

“What do you think?” you asked. 

Tsukishima stared down at his arm and read the words over again. There wasn’t any point in trying to understand them; he never would. They didn’t follow any line of logic as far as he was concerned.

“I don’t get it,” he said. After a huff, he added, “What are you doing?”

“I’m writing a poem! I found this book in the library and it was really weird and a didn’t make sense, but I kind of liked it. I wanted to try and write like that poet.”

He looked down at the words again, brows furrowing. “Couldn’t you just write it down on paper?”

You hummed. “Well, the only paper I had on me had my notes on it from class and I didn’t want to forget it. And…”

“And?” he urged when your voice trailed off.

“And, we haven’t talked or seen much of each other in a while,” you sighed. “It seemed like a fun way to reach out to you.”

The first part was true. While play-dates had been a regular thing in the past thanks to your parents, those kinds of arrangements were unnecessary once you moved up to middle school: you both were old enough to make your own plans, granted you would still have to ask permission beforehand.

Now that you weren’t little anymore, Tsukishima concluded that the two of you were just too different. At age five, every whimsical fantasy you had as a kid was normal at the time. At age eight, those absurd “what if” questions you’d ask him were normal. At age thirteen, these things were not normal. Even if you were trying to be funny or cute with them, it wasn’t coming off right.

For the past few months, he wondered exactly how you had ended up being his predetermined match. It could have been a blip in the system. It wouldn’t have been the first time; there’s billions of people in this world, after all. While the idea of soulmates is inherently romantic, there are plenty of reasons at why someone’s soulmate wouldn’t necessarily be who they’d end up with.

But even then, they’re supposed to be the person who understands you the most. Whether or not you understood him didn’t change the fact the he didn’t understand you. To Tsukishima, you were a box full of puzzle pieces from completely different puzzles and he couldn’t put you together even if he tried.

“Kei, did you like the poem I wrote for you?”

That enthusiasm that you would have normally had when you’d ask that kind of question wasn’t there. You weren’t asking because you wanted to boast something you were proud of and wanted your pride stroked a little more. It was quieter and more concerned. Maybe even a little scared.

He didn’t answer your question at first. If he wanted to be honest and say no, you’d probably ask him a lot of questions after about why and he didn’t feel like answering them. If he wanted to lie, it wouldn’t matter because the fact that he hesitated before answering said enough for him.

He decided to not to answer it at all.

“I have to go now, (F/N),” was all he said before hanging up the phone.

Two years go by. High school begins. Attending separate middle schools only exacerbated the idea that you were incompatible with each other. The distance made it excusable to not bother trying to figure it out. But going to same high school and being in the same class on top of that made it painfully obvious how even being in the same room did nothing to force either of you to address this.

Finally, one day after summer break, you wrote a word upon your wrist again for the first time in a very long time.

The word you wrote was, “edges.” A week later the word, “hammer” appeared on his arm before lunch. He decided he was just going to end it there.

Tsukishima approached your desk and spoke to you for the first time in years. The much higher voice you were used him having was gone. The almost bored tone replaced the brightness it once held from his childhood–although it started fading not long before you two stopped talking. Even though he’d been called on plenty of times to answer questions in class, you still couldn’t adjust to it.

“Please stop writing arbitrary words on us. I’ve gotten too many questions about whether or not I really had ‘edges’ tattooed on my forearm last week. Even more when I bothered to explain it.”

You looked at him rather stone-faced, but then turned your attention out the window. After taking a deep breath, your expression shifted, looking more forlorn than anything.

“They’re not arbitrary,” you mumbled. “They’ll make sense in the end.”

You couldn’t see his face, but you took his silence as a mark of confusion.

“You remember the first word I wrote, right? The first time we met?”

Of course, the word “sky” couldn’t leave him. How many people swooned over it when they found out that was how you two found each other? Well, he supposed it could have been something stupider, like one of those words you had made up that day. He answered affirmatively in only a word.

“Good. And you also remember last week’s word. Remember this week’s word too. I don’t know when the next important words will come to me, but don’t forget them when they do.”

“Is this supposed to be a game or something? What are you doing?”

“I’m writing a poem.”

The conversation sounded awfully familiar.

“If you want to write a poem, that’s fine. You can do whatever, but stop writing it on me.”

You reflect on his words briefly, and your lips tug upwards into what could be a smile. “Do you mean ‘on’ as in physically on or ‘on’ as in ‘about’?”

Tsukishima’s eyebrows knitted together. If circumstances had been different, he might have laughed at that and teased you about that being lame play on words. Instead, he begrudgingly gave in. “We’re getting nowhere. Just do whatever and I’ll roll my sleeves down until your done with this.”

He turned to go back to his desk.

“After you memorize each word, right?”

This question also went unanswered.

However, he was not immune to the white bear problem: when one tries not to think about something, they inevitably are forced to think about it. Such was the case whenever a word appeared on him. Either way, it wasn’t particularly bothersome or difficult for him to memorize one word at a time in a list of unconnected words. The fact that they would appear in sporadic intervals, but never less than a day between them sometimes, helped in that way.

The inconvenience was that it had to show up somewhere on his body. There wouldn’t be any warning from you either. One night he went to bed and woke up to find a new word scrawled across one of his wrists. By the beginning of October, you wrote the last word you wanted him to remember. That was it for now. Assuming the words had come to you in the order you intended, he couldn’t string together anything coherent from them.

Sky. Edges. Hammer. Light. System. Black. Tick.

“Well, those are only the key words from it. One day, I’ll show you the rest,” you explained.

“One day” came in about eight. His hand was bandaged and a little bloody still from the match earlier that day, but the words appeared well enough below the edge of the bandages for him to read each word clearly. Maybe Akiteru told you what happened and helped you figure out where on your arm you should start writing.

No. You had been there to watch. He didn’t know for sure, but it felt exactly like something you would do. He rolled his jacket sleeve back down so his teammates wouldn’t see, but uncovered it when washing his hands in the bathroom. Only the first word, “sky” was contained in the four lines of text.

On the bus ride home, seven different lines appeared where the first for had been. “Edges” and “hammer” showed up in them, and after an hour or those lines were scrubbed off and replaced by the next set. This continued until nightfall.

Tsukishima stared at the last set of words on his forearm. For the first time in a very long time, you had written something to him that made some sort of sense. There was still a clear attempt at the abstract, but it was accessible enough. It was a small one, but he smiled. This was the first time you made him do so in five years.

The next day your doorbell rang. It was unexpected but at the same time, expected too, that you found Tsukishima in the doorway when you answered it. Neither of you said anything, but you let him in. You lead him to sit on the walkway outside like you used to do before the chasm between you appeared. You’re not sure how much time passed—it was at least ten minutes, you were sure, or it felt like that—until you finally spoke up, voice quiet.

“I asked Takeda-sensei one time if he knew anything about incompatible soulmates,” you started. A brief glance in his direction was enough to see the almost undetectable confusion on his face. “Well, it goes without saying that Modern Literature is my favorite subject and he’d become my favorite teacher. I bring my poems to him to workshop a lot.”

“Oh,” is his only reply. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to figure out, but he never gave it any thought until then.

After a brief moment of silence, you continued, “He said it was uncommon but also not unheard of. That there are times that things between soulmates just don’t work out, sure, but also that not every set of soulmates is matched up for the same reason. Sometimes you’re not paired with the person who understands you better than anyone else, but rather the person who forces you to think in a different mindset and to look at things other than how you would have on your own. They’re the person who looks at your first draft and asks ‘Well, what if you did this instead?’ because they think it will push you into creating something spectacular. They may not be your other half, but they are the person who ends up bettering you.”

There was another long silence between you two, but not as long as before and certainly not as tense. With a soft laugh, you placed your palms behind you on the walkway and leaned back onto them.

“It took us a while to figure that one out, huh, Kei?” you asked. “It was something so simple the whole time.”

You glanced towards Tsukishima again, to find his gaze fixated on the ground. His arms were crossed loosely in front of him, elbows against his thighs to prop him up while he leaned forward. The hand injured the day before, rested on top of the opposite arm.

“It…makes sense,” he said. “Your poem was still something you would write, but I was able to grasp most of it. Maybe because I knew ahead of time that it was going to be about me, or maybe because you tried to make it obvious.”

“Yeah. But it won’t come together the same way if someone who didn’t know anything about you read it. Writers aren’t supposed to tell you exactly what they want you to get from their work, but I’m starting to learn that there’s someone I need to make exceptions for.”

“But this is only the first draft,” he said. “You’re missing a lot from the third system that I’d have to fill you in on. After that, there’s a fourth system and it’s just starting now.”

He smiled. It wasn’t the big grin you remembered seeing as a child, but you can’t remember the last time you saw him smile at all. In turn, you beamed right back at him. Whether or not you were lucky to have found each other at such a young age was moot. Maybe it took too long for either of you realize that you’d have to work at this, that it wasn’t going to click instantly. Most people around your age were only first meeting their soulmates now, so maybe it wasn’t unusual that it would take around ten years to find yourselves at square one along with them.

And that’s okay.

~*~

_You said to me once, “The world is systematic”  
_ _That may be true but  
_ _I remember you came to me from the sky.  
_ _Your wings weren’t arms, no feathers on your back._

_The first system:  
_ _We started without order only to be sculpted by edges  
_ _From the world around us, left out in the sun to bake and take shape._

_I know that a hammer came down on you—  
_ _Not a hammer really, but a dimming light  
_ _(with an albatross around his neck)—and  
_ _Shattered what you knew yourself to be._

_I didn’t see it, didn’t hear the noise  
_ _And only learned why from the hushed voices  
_ _Of the stars that saw it all and from the light himself_

_There weren’t directions on how to put you back together.  
_ _It wasn’t my place to anyway.  
_ _System number two broke down  
_ _Quietly,  
_ _In the same way fireflies float at night._

_System three was half-working when you found it.  
_ _It went something like this:_

_You’re worried you’ll get stuck in the rain, or take a shower,  
_ _Only to find the water running off your body turns black.  
_ _This is not a bad sign and you know this.  
_ _You know there’s merit in being a well-oiled cog  
_ _As long as the clock needs you to tick tick tick  
_ _The problem is the images of unused gears  
_ _Piled high in the back of your mind when the first  
_ _Graying droplets start pooling at your feet_

_Because system three can be fixed  
_ _But not by you, you decided.  
_ _You decided this before you knew of it.  
_ _Maybe it didn’t have to be system three.  
_ _It could be the tenth system, the twenty-third,  
_ _All broken too, but your mind was already made up._

_And from a list without order, this is what it took  
_ _To change that:  
_ _The sun  
_ _The stars who saw you shatter  
_ _A flock of crows  
_ _A cat and an owl  
_ _The dim light that’s starting shine again and trying to put system two back together_ _(the albatross flew away)  
_ _An eagle_

_To you, this is painfully obvious  
_ _But I did forget one:_

_A firefly circling around the moon_

_Now it’s learning how to turn the unpredictable  
_ _Into logic and lines, it can comprehend  
_ _Find gaps in the process, anticipate them too  
_ _Be the cog that stops the stuttering hands of a clock_

_To shine again and fly with the wings that were missing  
_ _When you fell from the sky before me  
_ _No. That’s not right.  
_ _They had always been there._

_System number four is still a work in progress.  
_ _The cogs understand they don’t mesh  
_ _But they want to.  
_ _Especially as the clock stutters again,  
_ _When fingers first intertwine,  
_ _When arms first embrace the familiar unfamiliar body,  
_ _When lips meet for the first time._

_This is normal for the fourth system.  
_ _The cogs understand they don’t mesh.  
_ _But they find that they can file their teeth_  
_Re-shape them just enough that  
_ _Even a drop or two of oil will turn the wheel with ease._

_They’ll make up for lost time._


End file.
